The present invention relates to a method and a device for controlling an agricultural working machine. EP 0 660 660 discloses equipping agricultural working machines with “GPS” systems to record the position of the agricultural harvesting machine in an area to be worked. In this process, the operator of the machine determined the route to be driven, and the GPS system-that is actively connected to a recording unit-delivered the position data of the vehicle, which were then used in the recording unit to electronically depict the driving path that had been covered. Systems of this type were an initial step in the direction toward recording driving routes, whereby the initial application was only to record driving routes. It was not possible to use systems of this type to perform advance planning of driving routes to be worked.
Building logically on the idea of displaying driving routes, systems as described in EP 0 821 296 enable the generation of driving routes as a function of external geometries of agricultural useful areas to be worked. The main advantage of these systems is that, for the first time, driving routes can be determined in advance with consideration for diverse optimization criteria, which, in the simplest case, are subsequently processed automatically by the agricultural working machine. Based on the fact that driving paths were defined in advance based on simple geometric interrelationships, systems of this type are only capable of subdividing the territory to be worked into these driving paths as a function of the working width of the agricultural working machine. Since the width of a territory to be worked is usually not a whole-number multiple of the working width of the agricultural working machine, route planning systems of this type are also used to work driving paths that require only a portion of the possible working width of the working machine. In the least favorable case, the situation can occur in which a great deal of effort-namely skillful maneuvering by the operator of the agricultural working machine-is required to work calculated driving paths in the edge regions, or, when substances are applied, such as fertilizer or herbicides, the situation can occur in which the particular substance is applied multiple times to the same partial areas of the territory to be worked. This results in increased costs due to an unnecessarily excessive application of the substance and, in the least favorable case, the multiple applications can also damage the plants.